Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book

By Lee Janogly

Do all your dieting attempts end in failure? Do you ever intend to eat one biscuit but actually polish off the packet? Does your weight vary enormously depending on how 'good' you've been? If this sounds like you, it won't for much longer! Take control of your eating habits with Lee Janogly and break free from the binge-diet-crave-binge cycle.

The reason why diets don't work for so many people is that they are actually binge eaters. This means that they can diet reasonably successfully until they get a taste of one of their trigger foods, whereupon they lose all self-control and eat as much food as they can physically cram in. The result is that a binger will be on a permanent see-saw of weight loss and weight gain, accompanied by varying degrees of guilt, anger, depression and frustration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780007375356

Lee Janogly

Lee Janogly is a diet counsellor, fitness intructor and, most importantly, an ex-binger: her weight used to fluctuate by 5 stone! She is also the author of Stop Bingeing! (Right Way books) which took the press by storm and sold 12,000 copies last year alone. She writes regularly on health and slimming issues for many newspapers and magazines and had a column in Slimming magazine for three years. She runs regular weight loss courses for bingers at her centre in Hampstead, London.

Book preview

Chapter One

There Ain’t No

Fairy Godmother

I am a diet counsellor.

If you came to me for dietary advice I would assume that you wished to lose your excess weight and remain slim for the rest of your life. Obvious? Not exactly. Most people are looking for a quick fix and want instant results – and why not? That’s how we approach a lot of the difficulties we encounter in our daily life, both at home and at work: identify the problem, find the solution, apply it and move on. Unfortunately, that won’t work with your weight. If you’ve got rather more fat reserves than you need, well I bet they were there yesterday, a week ago, maybe years ago. Building them up has taken a lot of time and loving care, so it will take more than a few days of low-fat food to reduce them.

But we live in a fast-track world. Many of us are drawn to short-term, intensive deprivation diets—cabbage soup for a week, for example—in the hope of quick weight-loss, even though the weight lost on such diets is usually just water. Few people these days seem to have the patience to aim for slow, steady weight-loss that will last for life.

Many people are so eager to shed their excess pounds quickly that they become vulnerable to the allure of unhealthy or unsustainable diet regimes. There seem to be two main ‘start-slimming’ periods each year: the first is from the beginning of January, after the boozy excesses of Christmas, and the second starts around the end of May, with the expectation (dread?) of appearing by a pool in a bikini. In both cases, the motivation of all participants would seem to be ‘How quickly can I get down to a size 10?’

Any weight you lose during this period is likely to go straight back on again. To succeed at a restrictive diet you have to ignore hunger pangs, which means you also end up ignoring feelings of satiety. Your eating ‘cues’ get confused and you start looking for food in response to emotional rather than physical prompts. When you follow a diet formulated by someone else, your relationship to food can be disrupted and even break down, causing you to eat in a chaotic manner.

If your most recent dieting effort ended in failure, then I’m pretty certain that the programme will have contained one of the following words or phrases: Atkins, protein-only, detox, calorie-counting, red day, points, sins, colonic, food combining, blood group, eliminate wheat/dairy/tea/coffee/alcohol. But don’t despair: we’ve all done the same. Chalk it up to experience and now…get real!

A Long-term Approach

You don’t have to be a martyr to change your lifestyle and your weight. You live in the real world where there are social occasions, celebrations, family gatherings, holidays—and supermarket checkouts stacked with chocolate bars. In this real world we experience stress, mood swings, happiness, sadness, tensions and boredom, and we are surrounded by food all the time. You need a strategy for dealing with all of this without having to think constantly ‘Will I be breaking my diet?’

If you have been on the dieting seesaw for many years and know that quick-fix methods have ultimately failed you, it may now be time to take a longer-term approach—to get slim and stay slim once and for all. Then you can get on with your life.

This book contains the information you need to achieve permanent slimness. After years of diet counselling, I have realized that you can’t ‘treat’ someone who is overweight. You can only explain the effects fat and sugar have on the body and then leave them to make their own decisions about what to eat and how much. People have to take responsibility and become self-directed.

I can only act as a guide. I will not be telling you what to eat. How can I know what you like to eat? I will advise which foods work to keep you healthy and the best time to eat them, but the final decisions are up to you. You are the one who does the eating. Only you.

Obesity is when you weigh a stone more than your doctor.

Get Real

It would be very easy for me to write a diet book containing 50 pages of cock-eyed theory followed by 70 pages of recipes. I am not going to do that! This is not a cookbook! There are no ‘tasty recipes’—like the example I saw recently in a slimming book: ‘Breakfast—a portion of smoked haddock with fine herbs, on a nest of mashed potato’. This author thinks it’s feasible for you to jump out of bed, get the kids up, fed and ready for school with lunch boxes, gym clothes and homework, get yourself ready for work, then whip up a lovely dish of smoked haddock and mashed potato for breakfast. Yeah, right! Not in our world.

Every diet you have ever followed has promised that you will lose so many pounds within a certain time frame. I make no such claims because with this method you chart your own course. You will choose when to eat, what to eat and how much to eat. You will work out your own eating pattern that fits in with your lifestyle and is exclusive to you.

All you will get from me are common sense and a method that has worked for 98 per cent of my private clients (every counsellor gets one or two nutters!). If you feel that the time is right to sort out your shape once and for all, then stick around. If this is not for you, there’s a whole shelf of quirky diet permutations for you to enjoy…

Let’s Face It

If you’re with me, we’ll start with some hard facts that you may not want to hear. First, there ain’t no Fairy Godmother! Sorry. No magic wands to make that fat disappear. It took time for that fat to settle so comfortably round your waist and hips—it will take time for it to go. So? What are you doing for the next few months, maybe even the next year, while you lose the weight? You will still be living the same life, with the same family, same friends, same job – only gradually getting slimmer. There’s no hurry. No-one is offering you a contract to pose naked for a Playboy centrefold – are they?

Now the rest of the ‘real deal’ facts—let’s get them all out of the way as quickly as possible:

1. Your body shape is the result of your lifestyle choices. It is the type of food you choose to eat, the quantities you serve for yourself, the exercise you do – or don’t do – and the excuses you make for those decisions. All these factors determine what you look like and how you think about yourself.

2. Losing weight starts in the mind. If you just focus on the food, all you end up with is the Atkins Diet. The thoughts you put into your mind influence which foods you put into your mouth. ‘Ooh that looks delicious.’ ‘Surely a little bit won’t hurt.’ ‘I’ve had a lousy week.’

If you agree with those two statements, you must also agree that the reason you are fat is because you are choosing to be. This is the most difficult concept to take on board, but let’s face it: you are the only one who puts food in your mouth. You can’t be fat unless you overeat on a regular basis, and you can’t do that unless you arrange your life so that you are constantly around food. You probably use food for every occasion – as a celebration when you are happy, as a calming agent when you are stressed, as medication when you feel down, and as companionship when you feel bored or lonely.

For you, food is providing some sort of purpose other than nutrition. You are feeding some need in yourself. As long as that unacknowledged need is there, it won’t make any difference which diet you follow or how many times you succeed (temporarily) in losing weight. If you don’t know why you overeat, then you will never remain permanently slim.

Choosing to be Fat

Maybe you just enjoy food so much that every meal is a party and you eat more than your body needs to stay slim and healthy. Maybe you put yourself on such stringent diets that you feel deprived and end up bingeing. Maybe you constantly tell yourself how fat and disgusting you are and how much you hate yourself, and use food to blot out the image this presents. Whatever—you are choosing to be fat.

Think carefully about this because I know your natural response will be ‘How could I be choosing that?!’ I’ll tell you:

image 1 Every time you eat a chocolate biscuit instead of an apple, you are choosing to be fat. No, one biscuit won’t make you fat but it will certainly influence what you eat later – and it reinforces that, for you, the choice is always the chocolate rather than the apple.

Every time you break off a chunk of cheese from a block in the fridge and pop it into your mouth, you are choosing to be fat. No, cheese is not a calcium-rich, healthy snack. It is a lump of flavoured fat – and saturated fat at that.

image 1 Every time you drink an extra glass of wine, which might weaken your resolve and influence your choice of food (and you know very well that it does that), you are choosing to be fat.

image 1 Every time you slump in front of the television on a bright, sunny evening instead of going for a walk, you are choosing to be fat.

So you see it takes quite a lot of organization to be fat. You have to actively work at it. You are not genetically programmed to carry around an excess amount of blubber, forcing your heart to work that much harder to pump blood around your body. Everyone has a natural set-point of how they are meant to look, based on their genes. Although there are some hereditary factors that will influence your shape, such as wide hipbones or thick ankles, you are not predisposed to carry vast amounts of weight around to the detriment of your health.

You can only be fat if you have created an environment that over-rides these factors and supports being overweight. Here’s how to tell if you are doing it:

image 1 You keep a ‘chocolate biscuit’ cupboard in your house (for the children? Those grown-up children who left home five years ago? Or those little children who will eat whatever you give them?)

image 1 Your desk drawer at work resembles a sweet shop

image 1 You think low-fat crisps are a healthy option

image 1 You feel cheated if you don’t have dessert in a restaurant

image 1 You have ‘no time’ for exercise

image 1 You get up late and have a chaotic life

image 1 Your social life is defined by food instead of activity

image 1 You are too tired after work to cook a healthy meal

image 1 You are contemplating taking one of those products that stops your body assimilating fat – making it OK to eat that plate of chips because the fat it contains will not be digested (dream on!)

If you keep cakes in the house, sooner or later you will eat them.

The Problems

I’m not being insensitive and certainly do not wish to discriminate against fat people—although I did have a very uncomfortable plane journey back from New York seated next to a lady who could have qualified for group medical insurance all on her own! I do know what it’s like to overeat—regularly and continuously. I won’t bore you—yet—with my dieting history! I do understand that whenever you overeat, you are not consciously choosing to be fat. The last thing you want to be is fat. What you are choosing is to be mindless—separating your mind from your body.

At the moment of reaching for the food you are not connecting what you are eating with the shape of your body. All you know is that you want—or need— to eat something, and you are choosing to ignore the fact that it will make you fat. Intellectually you know this but you are choosing to disconnect as the impulse to eat over-rides the intellect. Then you profess not to understand why your excess weight won’t shift.

Using Food as a Reward

Eating is a basic instinct. Scientists use mice and rats for experiments because they want to measure the results they get from basic instinct, not carefully thought-out decision-making. They program the rodents to understand that if they do what the researcher wants they will be rewarded with food. But to condition these rodents, scientists manufacture a situation where the rodents are really hungry so the food can be used as a reward. People often do the same thing to themselves to reward themselves with food. They wait until they are tired, hungry, depressed, weak, sleepy or anxious before allowing themselves to eat, then they reward themselves with fatty, sugary food.

In most aspects of your life you plan in advance: you wouldn’t wait until your car was completely empty before filling it with petrol. When it comes to eating, however, many of us don’t bother planning ahead. Eating can easily become something we do to respond to the moment.

Your brain naturally craves foods to meet specific needs, such as to make hormones and neurotransmitters, replace spent fuel stores or rebuild damaged muscles. By the time you crave nutrients to meet those needs, you have already suffered a deficiency. Your body signals you with urgent warnings that force you to over-correct, which means overeat. So by neglecting to feed your brain and body with what it needs before it starts a craving, you set yourself up to eat too much.

Self-esteem and Bingeing

In the fat war, there are no victims—only volunteers. That fat didn’t just happen. You created the shape of your body internally, by how you feel about yourself and the things you say to yourself, and externally by the food choices you make. If you are always criticizing yourself, putting yourself down, telling yourself how awful you look, how greedy and disgusting you are, you will never lose weight permanently. No-one ever lost weight by being humiliated.

Bingers—people who use food in response to emotions rather than hunger – live with this continual low-grade preoccupation with food which erodes their self-esteem but seems normal to them. Regardless of their weight, many women feel uncomfortable about some aspect of their body. They dislike the body they live in and, as a result, end up disliking the person who lives there.

Most bingers are aware of the fact that their weight is creeping up. As weight gain is a relatively slow process, however, they tend to deny that this is happening. They refuse to admit that they eat anything fattening. ‘Oh come on, a couple of biscuits at teatime isn’t going to put on that much weight!’ and live in a state of permanent denial. You only confront the issue when forced to do so either by a medical examination or having to let out your shower curtain! By then, instead of just dropping 10 pounds, you find you need to lose three stone to look halfway decent.

But suppose it happened overnight? Suppose you went to bed weighing 8 stone 10 and woke up the next morning weighing nearly 14 stone, fat and bloated? You would be horrified and panic-stricken, wondering what sort of disease you had contracted overnight.

The disease is eating the wrong food—that ‘couple of biscuits’ multiplied 20 times over, day after day, week after week. That’s what you have been doing to yourself. The fact that it might have taken years rather than happened overnight is beside the point.

If the way you are behaving now is keeping you fat, you have to decide to behave in a different way.

Don’t be a Food Victim

It’s easy to become a ‘food victim’ and put the blame elsewhere: your job, your mother, the kids, money problems, holidays. Sure, these can all cause stress. You can’t control other people—only yourself. You can’t control events—only your reaction to those events. The events will happen whether you deal with them calmly or stuff yourself with food.

You are not stupid. You know that if you eat 1,000 calories of food and only burn off 500, the other 500 are going to make their way to your fat cells and stay there. So you don’t need someone to come along and tell you not to eat that extra 500 calories. Yet in spite of knowing it, you still turn to food for comfort.

And food is comforting. One of the first sensations any of us can remember is being held and fed, so you equate love and food. Food is instant relief, calming, soothing your jangled nerves, banishing stress, an antidote to feeling lonely, sad, angry or depressed. So what you are doing is medicating yourself with food. You are using food to change the way you feel. As one of my diet clients explained, ‘I feel as if it is the only time I can have what I want, when I want it and I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.’

If you settle down in front of the television with a pile of biscuits, chocolates, crisps, fizzy drinks and ice cream, it provides instant gratification. But what you are doing is actually abusing yourself with food, the same as other people abuse alcohol or drugs. You come to rely on this type of food almost as a recreational drug to attain, fleetingly, a pleasant state of mind. By doing this you also create the need for more and more of those foods as an antidote for how they make you feel after the eating marathon—nauseous, bloated and dispirited about the effect on your body.

What you have to try to discover is why you are doing this. Before you start going in the right direction, you have to stop going in the wrong direction. The last thing you want is to be fat, so ask yourself if there is some aspect of your life that throws you into the kind of despair that makes you turn to food. Sometimes it can just be a stressful day, but often there may be deeper, ongoing situations that you can’t change, like taking care of an elderly parent. In this case, you have to learn to deal with them without resorting to food. If you continue to binge or simply overeat regularly as your method of coping, it stops you dealing with reality. You just get instant false relief and the stressful situation remains the same.

Diet Stress

Sometimes just the thought of going on a diet—‘I’m never going to eat biscuits or cakes ever again!’—can make you feel stressed. You think of your sugar-fix as a drug and, as with any drug, you fear withdrawal symptoms or that you will feel deprived. The stress this invokes just makes you want to eat more, but this sort of stress is just something you have manufactured so that you can use it as an excuse to stuff your face.

When I ask my clients what makes them eat inappropriately, I get the following answers:

1. Boredom. So does eating cake relieve boredom? Boredom is a state of mind. If you are doing something that fully occupies your mind, you’re not bored and don’t think about eating. In truth, eating will simply intensify your boredom because the sugar makes you feel lethargic, and instead of doing some energetic physical or mental activity, you lounge around feeding your perceived feeling.

2. It relaxes you. Really? Yes, eating carbohydrate foods like biscuits can relieve anxiety and, as the food fills you up, you do experience a certain relief. But what about later when you try on your favourite trousers and they won’t do up? How relaxed are you then?

3. Having a bad day. Everyone has good and bad days, even people who don’t binge. Let’s face it: some days are a total waste of make-up! Eating sugary food will just make a bad day worse. You must have dealt with bad days before without bingeing, so are you just using this as an excuse to eat?

If you take the food out of the equation, you have to find another way of coping with whatever problem is driving you. Sometimes it is difficult to put your finger on exactly what is making you overeat. Maybe it started as a habit and just carried on that way. The trouble is that overeating is an auto-exacerbating disease—the more you do it, the worse it becomes. When you eat you feel guilty and disgusted with yourself, and when you feel that bad, you eat.

The only way to cure this habit is to manage it.